Write on: Letters to the editor
Interest rates
Why have interest rates been going up?
One argument is that as rates rise overseas Australia must follow suit to access an adequate supply of the world's savings. This is a bad argument.
The international mobility of savings in response to differential interest rates is sometimes exaggerated. Furthermore, savings are merely a means to investment. There's no point hiking interest rates if this kills investment, no matter how much it increases savings.
If we want overseas savings we may sometimes have to pay high rates for them. However, the situation in relation to Australian residents is quite different.
Australians can be prevented by law from shifting their savings overseas. More critically, we should be financing local investment through progressive taxation — used to stock public banks — rather than offering above-inflation interest to disproportionately wealthy private savers. To generate, socially necessary savings, the affluent should be taxed, not paid unearned income.
Rydalmere NSW
East Timor
Congratulations for keeping the focus on East Timor and the Timor Gap Treaty. It has all but disappeared from the mainstream press.
And now there is terrible hardship caused by flooding in the Suai area. Also hit are the hostage camps in West Timor.
I urge anyone who can, to get involved or keep involved in the East Timor issue. They still need our help.
Secretary, Australia-East Timor Association
Paddington NSW
Fiji coup
The coup in Fiji at 10am on May 14, 1987, was led by Lieutenant-Colonel Rabuka, with sixteen armed men in balaclavas. As far as I know, not one of the sixteen has since been identified.
The coup arrested and detained in jail the elected prime minister, Dr Timothy Bavadra. Dr Bavadra's Fijian government had announced its refusal to allow nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed warships of the United States to R&R in Fijian ports. His people were demonstrating with banners proclaiming a Nuclear Free Pacific.
The United States "special envoy" to the UN, Mr Vernon Walters, since retired, visited Fiji prior to the May 14 1987 coup, after talks with the Australian government.
Wentworth Falls NSW
Nuclear madness
Evidence produced at the 1993 Replacement Reactor Inquiry showed quite clearly that HIFAR, the current Lucas Heights reactor, was and is a massive economic liability. It also showed that long periods during which HIFAR was shut down did not result in either economic or medical calamity, because cheap radio-isotopes for nuclear medicine are readily available from overseas.
At the end of the inquiry ANSTO had abandoned the argument that the Lucas Heights "research" reactor had medical significance; instead, they plugged the equally meaningless notion that Australia's influence on the global nuclear club would be impaired if we didn't run one of these outmoded facilities.
Just how this might affect decisions taken by this gang was hard to see, given that Australian has consistently voted with the US on every nuclear issue. Meanwhile, ANSTO has revived the nuclear medicine furphy.
Permanent close-down of the Lucas Heights reactor would show that nothing important is at stake. Instead $500 million is to be spent on a "new" reactor while Lucas Heights residents and indigenous land-owners in South Australia are going to be coerced into having their lands contaminated in order to chase a will-o-the-wisp in the minds of military and scientific bureaucrats who are desperately clinging to dreams of an "Australian bomb" as well as to their salaries.
Absurd though this may be, it clearly demonstrates that in a senseless and chaotic system it is pointless to search for reasonable explanations in the rhetoric of the decision-makers.
Meanwhile, thanks to Jim Green for his excellent coverage of nuclear issues in GLW.
Gerry Harant
Blackburn VIC
Bondi Beach and jobs
As a long-time environmental activist I have had many "discussions" with members of the CFMEU — mostly forestry and mining workers — about the role they play in environmental destruction. Their usual justification is "I've got a family to feed ... I'm just doing my job".
My reply is, "I have a family too. I'd like them to have a future with fresh air, clean water and no threat of nuclear disasters".
The situation at Bondi Beach with CFMEU workers continuing to work on the Olympic volleyball stadium, despite protests from local Aboriginal people, environmentalists, Bondi residents and other concerned citizens, is yet another example of the self-interest policies of the CFMEU. Even the threat of Hepatitis A from a sewerage pipe damaged in the first days of construction (GLW, May 24) hasn't made any difference to the jobs at any cost mentality typical of the CFMEU and successive conservative governments.
Wouldn't it be great if the construction workers at Bondi developed a social conscience, put down their tools and showed solidarity with the hundreds of ordinary Australians who are objecting to the stadium being built.
Nothing can be built, bulldozed, dug-up or cut down without workers. Unless the trade unions, in particular the CFMEU, start caring for ideals greater than their pay packets, they will continue crossing the people's picket lines as scab labour for the almighty dollar.
Secretary, People Against Racism In Aboriginal Homelands
Cox Peninsular NT